A High Performance Network Interface in Cloud

With the development of cloud technologies, more and more manufactures of Telecommunication and IT intend to migrate their products into cloud to utilize its advantages, such as elasticity, lower cost, high availability…etc. The recent popular concept of NFV (Network Function Virtualization) is based on this idea. However, one of the big challenges we have to face is that legacy products are implemented based on proprietary hardware, such as ASIC, FPGA and Network Processor. Due to their special structure and instruction sets, so far there's no appropriate way to move them into cloud. Consequently, a solution of high performance network interface designed for cloud is needed. This article defines a solution HPNI which is based on General Purpose Processor and Linux, implementing network interface through poll mode user space driver. At the end of article, a comparison is made between traditional network interface driver and this solution.